by | Aug 13, 2024 2:35 pm | Comments (1)
Thomas Breen photo
Signs of the times, outside of Wexler Grant's polling place.
Ponytails and pairs of glasses have been popping up all over parts of Dixwell and Newhallville, in a show of support for candidates in a race not many might typically pay close attention to — a summer primary for state representative.
by | Aug 9, 2024 4:28 pm | Comments (13)
Thomas Breen file photo
A 69-unit "mass timber" affordable housing complex on the rise at Dixwell-Munson-Orchard.
As the three Democratic candidates for Newhallville-Hamden state representative discussed key issues like teacher pay and income inequality, one issue rang especially important at Thursday’s political debate: affordable housing.
Continue reading ‘Candidates Pressed For Affordable Housing Answers’
by | Aug 9, 2024 2:30 pm | Comments (6)
Laura Glesby Photo
Abdul Osmanu, Steve Winter, and Tarolyn Moore after the debate.
“Like Abdul just said…”
“I do kind of agree with Steve…”
“Tarolyn’s exactly right…”
“My answer was what he said!”
Phrases like these were heard frequently at a political debate on Thursday evening, where three state representative candidates agreed more than they disagreed on issues such as tenants’ rights, income inequality, teacher pay, and the role of deep listening in politics.
Continue reading ‘State Rep Candidates Debate ... & Largely Agree’
by | Jul 24, 2024 5:25 pm | Comments (5)
Jabez Choi Photos
Nappésoul's Gregory Smith, José Gragirene, Laquaya Smith, and Madison Foster tend to a baby chicken.
It's pond time, on Butler Street.
Last week, the pond in Nappésoul’s Newhallville backyard was just a hole in the ground.
By Wednesday morning, with the help of a federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant, the hole had turned into a filtered, aquaponic pond system, with koi fish and minnows on the way.
by | Jul 9, 2024 2:26 pm | Comments (1)
Lisa Reisman photo
Marcus Harvin at Saturday's doc premiere, with Bill and Kathy Carbone.
In the trunk of his car, Marcus Harvin has a rock from the parking lot of a vacant building on Bassett Street. So does his friend Babatunde Akinjobi. The two met when they were incarcerated at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield.
“Each of us carries it around, believing that one day soon we will cut a ribbon for that property,” Harvin told a spirited audience of 60 family, friends, and supporters at Peterson Auditorium at the University of New Haven (UNH) on Saturday night.
The occasion was the premiere of “Fresh Start: A Marcus Harvin Story.” The short documentary, which was produced and directed by UNH film students Elisa Broche, Jay Sanders, and Gabe Nelson, chronicles Harvin’s journey from incarceration to Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) graduate to UNH presidential fellow to founder and president of the nonprofit Newhallville Fresh Starts, Inc., an enterprise to feed people’s dreams.
Continue reading ‘Documentary Spotlights Newhallville Community Activist’
by | Jul 5, 2024 9:34 am | Comments (2)
Contributed photo
UNH film student Elisa Broche (second from right) with her family in Honduras.
Elisa Broche won’t be at Saturday’s premiere of her new documentary about Newhallville community activist Marcus Harvin at the University of New Haven.
That’s because the 19-year-old student filmmaker is back in her home city of Tegucigalpa, Honduras — doing everything she can to raise enough money to return to West Haven to complete her studies.
Continue reading ‘Movie To Premiere In Student Filmmaker's Absence’
by | Jul 3, 2024 9:25 am | Comments (9)
Lisa Reisman photo
Sykes brainstorming with Asst. Chief Bhagtana.
Back in 2019, then-NHPD Lt. Manmeet Bhagtana and then-Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn drove around the neighborhood identifying the light posts that were either out or low. At night Bhagtana had her officers check the same. Bhagtana wrote up a list for UI, and gave them the crime stats from CompStat. Then she learned UI would replace the light posts.
“After that, residents felt safer and they started talking to us because that’s what they wanted, to know that we see them and we respect them and we care,” Bhagtana, now assistant police chief, said at Saturday’s lively “I Love Newhallville” symposium at Albertus Magnus College’s Behan Community Room.
Continue reading ‘Symposium Shows The Love For Newhallville’
by | Jul 2, 2024 12:30 pm | Comments (11)
Thomas Breen photo
Broken windows, for now, at 188 Bassett.
New Haven Adult Education’s planned move from the Hill to Newhallville took a key step forward, as the zoning board cleared the way for the city to build a new 4,500 square-foot addition to the back of a derelict building on Bassett Street.
by | Jul 1, 2024 12:37 pm | Comments (8)
Jabez Choi photo
Abdul Osmanu and John Vargas: Electricity bills have gotten "insane."
Carrying a white tote bag and a handful of door hangers and a campaign pitch focused on affordable housing and powered by youthful activism, Abdul Osmanu knocked on door after door after door after door in his bid to become the next state representative for Newhallville, Prospect Hill, and southern Hamden.
At the age of 22, he’d already been there before.
by | Jul 1, 2024 9:22 am | Comments (1)
Contributed photos
This Citizen Contribution was submitted by Dawn M. Slade of DMS Communications.
It may not win an Oscar. Yet it may be the most important film they ever make.
by | Jun 19, 2024 12:19 pm | Comments (15)
Nora Grace-Flood file photo
Jeanette Sykes, at the helm of new neighborhood dev corp.
A group of Newhallville residents has banded together to build affordable, owner-occupied housing — and expand awareness of neighborhood resources — by way of a revived community development corporation.
by | Jun 19, 2024 9:26 am | Comments (9)
Abiba Biao photos
Alder Mabery-Niblack, Kierra Guest, and Steve Winter ...
... ready to clean clean clean, including the pile of trash sitting outside Felicia Jones’s apartment.
Felicia Jones couldn’t believe how much trash her former neighbors had dumped at the corner of Read and Butler streets.
Two weeks after those neighbors had moved out, the pile remained — stopping fellow Newhallville resident Gwenadine Felder in her tracks as she made her way down the block to pick up litter as part of a neighborhood cleanup.
by | Jun 18, 2024 9:30 am | Comments (31)
Arthur Delot-Vilain photos
Derek Baker: 201 Munson "fit all the bills"
Derek Baker unloaded his U‑Haul truck after wrapping up the roughly 700-mile drive from metro Detroit to Munson Street, as he prepared to enter a new stage of his life studying MRIs and brain scans at Yale — while living out of a brand new luxury apartment complex in a development-rich stretch of Dixwell-Newhallville-Science Park.
by | Jun 14, 2024 5:22 pm | Comments (2)
Allan Appel Photo
Emily Contreras Lopez and Karyssa Twig, headed to Amistad Academy and Betsy Ross Arts Magnet respectively, sing at Friday's graduation.
You can really tell the character of a school by its graduation exercise.
by | Jun 12, 2024 9:24 am | Comments (16)
Laura Glesby Photo
Steve Winter, at the doors with Pamela Stewart.
Dems Dems Dems for Winter: State Rep. Josh Elliott, State Rep. Roland Lemar, Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, State Sen. Martin Looney, Alder President Tyisha Walker-Myers, State Sen. Gary Winfield, and Alder Brittiany Mabery-Niblack.
Two mayors, dozens of state and local legislators, and a man who once ran against him for alder were among a crowd of New Haveners and Hamdenites who gathered on Monday to endorse Steve Winter for a rare open seat in the state legislature.
by | Jun 11, 2024 11:12 am | Comments (5)
Jabez Choi photos
Sunjai Yancey Williams, watering broccoli pots in the Ivy St. Community Garden.
First-graders Amayah Williams and Anastasia Rivera: Making dog treats for the animal shelter with "love."
Lincoln-Bassett School fourth-grader Sunjai Yancey Williams carefully poured water into a pot of broccoli sprouts. Her eyes were focused. The second she finished with the pot, they eased in relief.
She and her classmates were inside the greenhouse at the Ivy Street Community Garden for their Newhallville school’s “Community Day” — and helping the garden grow was part of the programming created by Assistant Principal Eva Schultz.
Continue reading ‘Lincoln-Bassett Students Lend A Helping Hand’
by | Jun 7, 2024 9:01 am | Comments (9)
Thomas Breen File Photo
794 Dixwell Ave.
The leaky roof of 794 Dixwell Ave. will soon get fixed, with the help of $300,000 from the city, in time for a new all-boys charter school to open there in the fall.
Continue reading ‘Alders Fund Clifford Beers, Charter School Roof Repairs’
by | Jun 5, 2024 4:48 pm | Comments (6)
Laura Glesby Photo
ConnCAT Youth Program Assistant Rachel Graziano (center) cuts the ribbon to her future home alongside ConnCORP's Ian Williams and Erik Clemons.
Rachel Graziano currently lives in Naugatuck, because the rent there is cheaper — but not for long.
By July, she’ll finally move back to her hometown of New Haven, renting a brand new Newhallville house built by her employer, the local workforce and housing developer ConnCAT/ConnCORP.
by | May 31, 2024 3:19 pm | Comments (0)
Lisa Reisman Photo
Newhallville's Jeanette Sykes: "You are taking a step in the right direction."
Questions from Newhallville neighbors flew fast and furious at a community meeting with a representative from Mandy Management on Thursday evening: Why is an old eviction still coming up when I’m applying for an apartment? How do I overcome a bad credit score? And what is the turnaround time for addressing repairs and upkeep?
by | May 28, 2024 12:00 pm | Comments (4)
Thomas Breen photo
Galina Zalman, in front of her 33 Hazel St. home in 2020.
New Haven’s new housing judge heard three versions of what went wrong at a Hazel Street rooming house.
In the process, she also got a firsthand look at some of the challenges facing people living one false step away from homelessness.
by | May 28, 2024 8:41 am | Comments (9)
Thomas Breen photo
15 Colby Ct., to be replaced by 4 new townhouse rentals.
A pair of plans to build four needed houses apiece moved ahead for underused plots of Upper Westville and Newhallville.
by | May 20, 2024 1:43 pm | Comments (10)
Staff Photos
Playing nice: Mutually complimentary 94th District office-seekers Abdul Osmanu & Steve Winter.
A next-generation primary contest is shaping up as a second candidate has emerged seeking the Democratic nomination for a New Haven-Hamden legislative district.
by | May 16, 2024 9:09 am | Comments (35)
Changing of the guard: Incumbent Porter, nominee Winter.
It appears something momentous will happen this year in New Haven: Voters will elect a new state legislator, for the first time in eight years.
That’s because incumbent State Rep. Robyn Porter did not show up to a convention Wednesday night to receive the Democratic Party’s endorsement to run for a sixth two-year term representing the 94th General Assembly District.
Continue reading ‘Surprise! Winter Tapped For Porter's Seat’
by | May 8, 2024 11:11 am | Comments (4)
Brian Slattery Photo
On the canal trail by the William "King" Lanson statue.
The history of New Haven entrepreneurship past and present. The fortunes of a neighborhood rising and falling, and rising again. The legacies of environmental depredation, and the work to create healthier, more sustainable places.
All these themes were touched upon in the latest walk from the New Haven Bioregional Group, in which Aaron Goode of Friends of the Farmington Canal Greenway led a group of about 30 walkers through the New Haven section of the urban trail that today connects almost seamlessly to Northampton, Mass.
Continue reading ‘Canal Walk Connects City's Past, Present, Future’
by | May 7, 2024 12:26 pm | Comments (3)
Lisa Reisman photo
Well-wishers gathered Sunday for Sister Geneva.
The late Geneva Pollock.
Geneva Pollock showed up.
She showed up for the three generations of students she taught English to at Jackie Robinson Middle School; for the neighbors she met on her Newhallville door-knocking tours; for anyone she heard had lost a loved one and was grieving.
On a brisk, grey morning, 125 people showed up to honor the legacy of Pollock, who died in May 2020 at 76 years old, with a street corner renaming.
The four-foot-nine dynamo who grew up picking cotton in Alabama went on to become “a teacher, a ward co-chair, an usher, a mother and grandmother, a friend, my friend, and so much more,” said Claudine Wilkins-Chambers, as she waited for the street renaming ceremony to begin. “She did so much for so many of us.”